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AMD has driven integrated graphics processors (IGPs) to all-new levels with its Ryzen 8000 G-series desktop CPUs. The most powerful of these new chips, the Ryzen 7 8700G, was a bit too pricey to be a highly attractive option, in our estimation. But that doesn’t apply to the more affordable Ryzen 5 8600G. Priced at $229 and loaded with a fast Radeon IGP, the Ryzen 5 8600G is a tantalizing option for gamers on a budget, earning an Editors’ Choice award in the budget-CPU category.Configuration and Architecture: The Budget IGP Gaming CPUThe AMD Ryzen 5 8600G is closely related to the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G as well as several mobile AMD processors, all of which share the same chip design. This chip in its entirety contains eight AMD CPU cores based on the “Zen 4” architecture alongside a dozen AMD RDNA 3 compute units. Each of those compute units contains 64 streaming processors, four texture mapping units (TMUs), two raster operation processors (ROPs), and a single ray-tracing core.
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(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
This hardware, on the higher-end Ryzen 7 8700G, enables the processor to run demanding games relatively well for an integrated solution. It doesn’t do well enough to rival most graphics cards, but it does put up a decent fight against the lowest-end graphics cards on the market, and it manages to beat out a few of these. That’s impressive, but it would be a lot more so if the Ryzen 7 8700G didn’t cost $329.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
At $229, the Ryzen 5 8600G is a more alluring option, and what you give up for that $100 price drop is worth it. In total, you only lose about one-fourth of the total hardware resources. Instead of having eight CPU cores, the Ryzen 5 8600G has six, but it has near clock parity with the Ryzen 7 8700G, and both processors have 16MB of L3 cache. Effectively, this means you can expect the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G to perform fairly close to each other in lightly threaded workloads, with the Ryzen 7 8700G picking up the advantage only when more than six cores are in use.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The graphics subsystem was scaled back, as well, on the Ryzen 5 8600G, with just eight compute units active. This gives it a total of 512 streaming processors, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and eight ray-tracing cores. Clock speed here has also hardly changed, with the Ryzen 7 8700G’s Radeon 780M IGP being just 100MHz faster than the Ryzen 5 8600G’s Radeon 760M IGP.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Though these cutbacks are significant and are evident in benchmarks, the price reduction is greater than the loss in performance. At $329, the Ryzen 7 8700G was hard to recommend, as you could realistically buy a separate budget-friendly processor and graphics card that would net you better results for a similar price. With the Ryzen 5 8600G, that’s simply a lot harder to do.Test Setup and CompetitionI tested the Ryzen 5 8600G on an ASRock B650 Pro RS motherboard with two 16GB sticks of G.Skill DDR5 RAM clocked at the processor’s official maximum supported RAM speed of 5,200MHz. The processor was cooled during the tests by a Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL240 Flux 240mm water cooler, and the system was powered by a SilverStone DA850 850-watt (W) power supply. (AMD also bundles a stock air cooler in the box, the capable Wraith Stealth pictured earlier, but we used our liquid cooler for the benchmarks below to keep parity with our other chip tests.)All of these components were built onto a Praxis Wetbench open testbed. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card was also added to the system and used for all tests except for the integrated graphics gaming tests. All tests were performed inside of Windows 11 Pro with the latest updates installed.
Among the closest competitors to the Ryzen 5 8600G is AMD’s aforementioned Ryzen 7 8700G, which is notably faster though with a much higher price. Intel also has several competitive chips, like the Intel Core i5-13600K and the Core i5-13400F, though these are imperfect rivals. The Core i5-13600K costs a fair bit more, and the Core i5-13400F lacks integrated graphics. In truth, the Core i5-12600K is arguably a far better competitor, though as it’s been out for some time now it’s questionable how much longer it will be available.CPU Tests: The 8600G’s Weak PointKicking things off with Cinebench R23, we can clearly see that the Ryzen 5 8600G was a step behind its more powerful counterpart, the Ryzen 7 8700G. It also lagged behind the Core i5-12600K and, to a lesser extent, the Core i5-13400F.
In my two Adobe-based tests, the Ryzen 5 8600G remained behind the Core i5-12600K and the Ryzen 7 8700G. The Core i5-13400F fell behind in Premiere Pro, and it failed to run the Adobe Photoshop benchmark. This allowed the Ryzen 5 8600G to pull ahead, though this was one of the few CPU tests in which it was able to do so.The Ryzen 5 8600G struggled while running HandBrake, which caused it to come dead last in the charts. It didn’t do any better in Blender, either. In POV-Ray, the Ryzen 5 8600G performed somewhat better, with its single-threaded performance outpacing the Ryzen 7 5700X and the Core i5-13400F. This didn’t carry over to the multi-threaded test though, where the Ryzen 5 8600G again came in last place. While you’ll get by in basic tasks with the 8600G, don’t expect it to carry out large CPU-bound rendering and exporting jobs with gusto.Graphics Card Tests: Some Hiccups…But Not the FocusNot only does the Ryzen 5 8600G have fewer cores than most of the CPUs that I tested, but it also has less L3 cache. It’s difficult to pin down exactly how this impacts performance for the Ryzen 5 8600G in the CPU benchmarks, but it has a more noticeable impact on gaming performance.
The Ryzen 5 8600G turned in the worst performance out of all tested chips in 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark, but this didn’t carry over to most real-world tests. In F1 22, the Ryzen 5 8600G performed well overall with 1440p and 4K performance in line with the other tested CPUs. (In these higher-resolution tests, the RTX 3080 GPU is doing most of the lifting.) It was marginally slower at 1080p compared with some Intel CPUs, but with a difference of about 3% it isn’t noticeable.Guardians of the Galaxy showed the Ryzen 5 8600G a bit further behind the competition at 1080p, with it about 7% slower than the Core i5-13400F. It was even further behind the Core i5-12600K and several other chips, and this is likely more due to its reduced L3 cache pool than anything else. We can tell this as the Ryzen 7 7600X is a similar processor that also has six CPU cores and runs at similar clock speeds, but it has double the L3 cache at 32MB. That we only see the Ryzen 5 8600G fall behind at higher frame rates is also a telltale sign that its reduced cache pool is likely the culprit.Total War: Three Kingdoms also showed the Ryzen 5 8600G behind at 1080p. Things were significantly worse in older games like Bioshock Infinite and the 2013 release of Tomb Raider, though. The Core i5-13400F surpassed the Ryzen 5 8600G by 9% at 1080p and 12% at 1440p, while most other processors were significantly faster than this. We saw something similar in Tomb Raider, where the Core i5-13400F was about 10% faster than the Ryzen 5 8600G at 1080p.IGP Tests: Radeon 760M Fits Just Right for 1080pThe Ryzen 5 8600G’s performance with a discrete graphics card was a bit lackluster, but it did a far better job when it came time to test the IGP. With 512 streaming processors clocked at 2.8GHz, the Ryzen 5 8600G is one of the best IGPs that I have tested. (Plus, if you’re buying this processor to use with a separate video card, you’re doing it wrong; you’re sidelining the best-value portion of this component, the IGP.)
Suffice it to say that the 8600G dominated the competition short of the 8700G in all areas. It wasn’t quite as fast as the Ryzen 7 8700G, but nothing else even came close to these two processors. In general, the Ryzen 5 8600G ran most games at 1080p faster than the competition ran them at 720p.For the most part, I run different tests on graphics cards and integrated graphics solutions like the Radeon 760M, but you’ll find a small amount of overlap in Bioshock Infinite. I test both graphics cards and IGPs with this game using the maxed settings at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. As mentioned earlier, most graphics cards are far faster than the Ryzen 5 8600G and its IGP, but I added AMD’s slowest and most affordable graphics card to the Bioshock chart for comparison.Here, the Radeon RX 6400 performed notably better, but it’s worth considering that the graphics card retails for around $139 and costs more than half of what the Ryzen 5 8600G does. If you opted to go this route instead of buying the Ryzen 5 8600G, you’d be left with just $90 for a CPU, and that will essentially force you into buying something older and even less capable than the Ryzen 5 8600G.Power and ThermalsI tested the power draw of the entire system using a Kill-A-Watt meter and found the Ryzen 5 8600G to be one of the least power-hungry socketed desktop CPUs I’ve tested in recent years.
In all areas, it consumed less power than all other CPUs in the chart, except for the Ryzen 7 8700G idling slightly lower. The processor did get rather warm during testing, though, hitting 90 degrees C.Verdict: The New IGP Gaming ChampionEvaluating a processor like the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G needs to be done in context. The Ryzen 5 8600G is a processor, but it’s not quite fair to say it’s just like all the others. Most processors we have tested are first and foremost just that: processors. They are designed with a focus on providing the best CPU performance possible within certain power, thermal, and budgetary constraints.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The Ryzen 5 8600G is different, though, as it trades off some of this CPU processing power for a considerable increase in graphics punch. If you’re going to buy a graphics card, this is not a trade worth making, but the Ryzen 5 8600G is meant for people who won’t purchase a graphics card. It’s targeted at those who want to play some games, possibly older titles, or even newer ones like F1 22 with reduced graphics settings, but don’t want to pay out a lot on an expensive gaming PC.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
It’s in this exact niche that the Ryzen 5 8600G thrives and arguably does so much better than any other option on today’s market. The Ryzen 7 8700G, as we discussed earlier, is too pricey to fill this role effectively, as you can buy a more compelling CPU and GPU combo for the price of the Ryzen 7 8700G. The same just isn’t true for the Ryzen 5 8600G and, unless you dive through eBay and purchase older and/or used hardware, you will have a hard time building a PC that can game as well as the Ryzen 5 8600G without paying more money. For that, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G earns our Editors’ Choice award for budget gaming CPUs.
The Bottom Line
AMD’s Ryzen 5 8600G isn’t the most muscular CPU you can buy, but it drives competitive integrated-graphics performance for its price. It’s an ideal chip for budget gaming PCs.
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